no records of note about White except that he featured in several of the school magazines as a member of the debating team where he seems to have performed adequately. The one speech of his whose substance was noted (without being recorded) was a spirited defence of Oliver Cromwell. Winchester could provide no evidence or record of his expulsion, but it is possible that public schools would perceive a need to expel a pupil as some sort of failure on their part. The school confirms that he got ‘an exhibition’ but points out that this was not as elevated as a scholarship.8
Sandhurst
White related that despite his absence from formal education for six months after his departure from Winchester, he still succeeded in gaining a King’s cadetship for Sandhurst. Whatever other admissions he made about being incorrigible or even mad, or later, cowardly, it was always important for him not to be seen as a fool.
His becoming a soldier could be seen as puzzling, and he does not comment on it, although his radical tendencies soon caused him problems. More than likely the decision arose from a combination of his father’s influence and the fact that there was little other choice open to him. There is a general consensus that the august military academy of Sandhurst was far from being an efficient training ground at that time. Like Sir George who, at the outset of the Boer War, ‘had never commanded an army in the field against forces armed with modern weapons’,9 Britain itself had had very few serious military engagements for nearly fifty years. This became evident in Africa when the general flabbiness of the military thinking in the college was shown up. The historian A.P. Thornton quotes Admiral of the Fleet Jackie Fisher, who said in 1903 about the Boer War that it was ‘accepted and continuing opinion in naval circles’ that:
One does not wonder at South Africa when one sees every day the utter ineptitude of military officers. Half the year they are on leave and the other half of the year everything is left to the sergeant-major and the NCO’s.10
White’s apparent perversity came to the fore when faced with what he might have believed to be a totally unnecessary task, but there was a justification to his discontent. The study of fortifications in particular aroused his ire, and he saw all the instruction as outdated by at least fifty years.11 This recalcitrance was reflected in his marks, but the most notable evidence was his rustication for riding in a point-to-point when he had been specifically forbidden to do so because of some previous infringement. He relates meeting at this time with his father, about to become Quartermaster General at the War Office, who had come back from India having broken his leg in seven places in a horse race in Calcutta (this man was now sixty-two). When White went with his mother to meet him off the boat, Sir George had already heard about Jack’s suspension:
Lying in his cabin with his leg in plaster of Paris, he greeted me ‘Well, Jack, I hear you’ve made a damned fool of yourself’. I knew I had, but I had learned the futility of too much self-abasement. ‘Well, Father,’ said I, ‘I heard something of your coming to grief in a somewhat similar manner’. My father smiled and the incident was closed.12
This is one of the rare comments on record of his father’s attitude to White’s exploits, but it does not appear to be inconsistent with the other details of Sir George’s attitude to his son’s behaviour. The telegrams (discussed in Chapter 4) that Sir George sent to Dollie, White’s fiancée, display a tolerance of, if not even some kind of resignation towards his son who seemed to be bent on a self-willed course regardless of any one else’s feelings.13
Alan, Jack White’s second son, believed Sir George was indulgent, particularly because he was both an absentee father and one who came to parenting rather later in life.14 It is possible nevertheless that Sir George saw something in his son that was not going to respond to any direct discipline, that is, an intransigence in the face of authority. Of course another perspective could see Sir George, faced with an obdurate son and an adoring mother, as taking the path of least resistance.
White certainly served his father loyally in his own way; there is not a single critical word about him anywhere in White’s writing, but the same cannot be said for his mother. In a letter to his niece, Pat English, he said that it was ‘the force of female suction that killed Rosie [his eldest sister]’ and implied that it was also responsible for his ‘father’s stroke’.15 This seems to be a reference to his mother, which is borne out by his niece who remarks that ‘from what I remember of her (and I was very fond of her) she would by any normal standards have been called a greedy selfish woman and a very powerful vampire’.16
It appears that Lady Amy White was a dominating woman who lived into her eighties. Certainly she was a very energetic woman; her diary in 1935, the year of her death, is filled with entries of social meetings and household tasks: ‘today I did out the boudoir cupboard, a long and tiresome job which I had not finished by luncheon […] after which I rested for one hour, […] I then dressed for Mrs MacGregor’s tea party’. She goes on to fill an entire foolscap diary page with details of people met and discussions had, before going back to finish the cupboard before dinner.17
At the end of his account of his Sandhurst days, White mentions two revealing incidents. The first describes the company he kept while awaiting his commission: he ‘gravitated towards the higher ranks of the aristocracy’. Their appeal, he conceded frankly, was ‘a certain recklessness’ and his ‘whole hearted snobbery’. This frankness runs right through all his writings and was the very essence of his disposition. Although at times endearing, it also provokes suspicion about its sheer manipulativeness. On a number of occasions he confesses to some unattractive behaviour on his part and it seems as if he is using it to forestall later criticism or in some way make it excusable. Certainly it adds weight to his credibility, and incredulity about some of the incidents related is often put in abeyance by the honesty he has demonstrated elsewhere.
In recalling his days mixing with ‘aristocratic friends’ he refers to his ‘unexpected bit’ as preventing his success as a snob. Having dressed immaculately to dine, he could not find a properly fitting top hat and so wore a bowler hat, which would appear to have been a deliberate social faux pas and probably looked ridiculous as well – ‘an outrage’. He wrote presciently, ‘I was never secure against this latent anarchist. He kept cropping up until he got me altogether in the end.’18 This was written at least six or seven years before his experience of Stalinism in the Spanish Civil War convinced him that he was an anarchist, at least politically. However, he seems to have been aware of his ‘unexpected bit’ long before that and it formed an explanation of sorts to himself for the various adventures he found himself involved in.
He finishes his account of his experiences in Sandhurst with another revelation of recalcitrance. He had been ‘gazetted to the 1st Gordon Highlanders then quartered in Edinburgh Castle’ and claims:
I did not like my brother officers and they did not like me. […] I disliked the self effacement which was the tradition for newly joined subalterns. I disliked being drilled over again. […] I disliked the salt I was obliged to eat with my porridge. I disliked everything and every one.19
He seems to have missed entirely the point about military training, which demanded a monastic-type obedience and submission to the will of whatever the soldier perceived to be his ultimate authority. He was completely unable to comply with any kind of subordination demanded of him unless he could establish an acceptable reason for it; orders for the sake of orders were a nonsense. His resistance was such that when his colleagues performed a mock court martial of him he was prepared to rebel to the point of killing someone: ‘the light irresponsible feeling had come to me,’ is how he describes the murderous emotion as if it was some kind of possession or even insanity over which he had no control.20
This was the autumn of 1899 and White, born into privilege and educated and trained as an executive of empire, now found that the time had come to support all that he had been conditioned to hold dear. Dulce et decorum est
